If you don't like the web client (I'm not a big fan of web clients myself) then you have other options to connect to the chat. Our chat relies on the time-tested Internet Relay Chat protocol so you can connect to it with any IRC client you'd like.

As you can find on our Livestream & Chat page, the server is irc.kbfail.net and the channel is #NCFC. As far as the port goes, the de-facto standard 6667 will work.

Here's some clients I can recommend. All of these have documentation of their own so I won't waste time writing up a guide for them.

Pidgin - This multi-protocol IM client supports IRC as well. You might already have Pidgin, so this is good news for you. Adium is the equivalent program for OS X.

Hexchat - Since pidgin supports so many protocols, it might be good idea to use a dedicated IRC client instead. This one is more or less the free Windows version of xchat.

ChatZilla is a client you can install as a firefox add-on if you're into that.